Your Fundraising Team Needs a Stop-Doing List

You don’t need more ideas. You need fewer priorities. And permission to kill a few sacred cows.

Am I the only person who is obsessed with that mentalist guy, Oz Pearlman?

You know, that dude who does super amazing mind-blowing tricks, like guessing your 3^rd grade teacher’s name or a random number you think of, and it usually involves a social media clip of a celebrity or athlete that has a near aneurysm or exploding brain when he gets it correct or running away in fear that he’s the devil incarnate?

Well today it’s my turn.

I’m going to be a Fundraising Mentalist for the next few seconds, and am about to blow your mind with my accuracy as you read the following.

Let me guess what someone - either a conference speaker, webinar presenter or some other professional in this nonprofit sector - told you to do this year:

Start a monthly giving program.

Launch planned giving.

Post more often on social media.

Apply for more grants.

Build a major gift program.

Improve the newsletter.

Host another event.

Create video content.

Use AI.

Call every single donor.

Recruit better board members.

Did I miss any?

Probably.

There’s always one more thing.

There’s always someone at a conference, on a podcast, in a LinkedIn post, or sitting across from you at a board meeting saying “have you considered also doing THIS?”

And every single one of those ideas might be useful.

However, they cannot all be priorities.

A small fundraising team usually does not fail because it lacks ideas. It fails because everything becomes urgent and nothing receives enough consistent attention to actually work.

You don’t need another to-do list.

You need a stop-doing list.

Before you can figure out what to stop, you need to get honest about what’s actually working. And I mean honest. Not “it feels like it’s working because we’ve always done it” honest.

Math honest.

Here’s the exercise: list every recurring fundraising activity your organization does.

Every event, every campaign, every appeal, every grant cycle, every committee, every social media effort, every newsletter, every program. All of it.

Then score each one from 1 to 5 in four areas:

1.    Revenue: Does it generate meaningful net income? Not gross. Net. After every expense, every staff hour, every hidden cost.

2.    Relationships: Does it deepen valuable donor relationships? Does it create real human connections or just put people in a room together?

3.    Strategic Value: Does it create future opportunities? New donors, new partnerships, new visibility that leads to something?

4.    Staff Burden: How much time and emotional energy does it require? Score this one in reverse so that a 5 means it’s easy, a 1 means it’s eating your team alive.

Now add up the scores. And I’m super duper sorry about the next statement.

You have to be brutally honest about net revenue.

An event that raises $80,000 but costs $52,000 and consumes four months of staff time did not “raise $80,000.” It created $28,000 before accounting for staff labor. If you paid your development director for those four months of event planning, the real number might be closer to $12,000.

That’s not a fundraiser.

That’s an incredibly expensive hobby.

Run the test on everything. Let the math be the argument.

The math doesn’t care about feelings, traditions, or Susan.

And so I give you a fantastic term: Fundraising Zombies.

Watch out! They hide in plain sight!

Fundraising Zombies are activities nobody believes in but everyone continues.

They’re not alive as they haven’t produced real results in years. But they’re not dead either. They just keep shuffling forward, consuming resources, and nobody has the courage to put them down.

You know a zombie when you hear the language around it:

— “We’ve always done it.”

— “The board expects it.”

— “A few donors like it.”

— “It might work eventually.”

— “We already purchased the software.”

— “Stopping would feel like failure.”

If any of those sentences just echoed in your head about a specific activity at your organization, congratulations! You found a zombie!

Here are some common zombies I see shambling through nonprofit hallways:

The golf tournament that barely breaks even but requires three months of committee management and sponsorship begging.

Weekly social media posting with no strategy — content for the sake of content, reaching nobody, converting nothing, but “we need to be consistent.”

Grant applications outside your mission — chasing money because it’s there, not because it fits.

A printed newsletter nobody can connect to a single gift — beautiful, expensive, and functionally decorative.

A committee that meets monthly but completes no assignments — a meeting for the sake of meeting. The organizational equivalent of a screen saver.

An expensive database used as a glorified address book — you’re paying for a Ferrari and using it to check the mail.

A Giving Day page launched without any personal outreach — posted it, shared it, hoped for the best, called it a strategy.

Every zombie on this list is consuming time, money, and emotional energy that could be going toward the activities that actually raise money and deepen relationships.

May I suggest a radical idea: Kill the zombies.

Or at least put them on a one-year pause and see if anyone notices. (Spoiler: almost nobody will.)

Now, you may want to select a VERY small number of things to keep.

And for most small nonprofit organizations, the highest-value fundraising activities are surprisingly basic.

— Thanking donors quickly

— Calling loyal supporters

— Meeting with qualified prospects

— Renewing dependable grants

— Giving board members specific assignments

— Collecting strong mission stories

— Following up when someone expresses interest

Not one of those is flashy. Not one will make your board say “wow, that’s innovative.” Not one requires a new platform, a new tool, or a new committee.

They work because they are directly connected to relationships and revenue.

That’s it. That’s the whole secret. The basics, done consistently, beat the fancy ideas done sporadically every single time.

Your job is not to do everything. Your job is to choose 3 to 5 things from this list, do them exceptionally well, and ruthlessly protect the time to do them.

Everything else? Parking lot.

Or graveyard.

Your choice.

This is the rule I wish every nonprofit would hire a local artist to plaster on the inside of their conference room wall:

Do not add a major new fundraising initiative unless you can answer: what will we reduce, pause, or stop to make room for it?

Adding monthly giving may be wise. But if nobody has time to welcome and steward monthly donors, you haven’t built a program. You’ve automated transactions.

Adding AI may save time. But if staff adopt six separate tools without rules or ownership, you haven’t saved time. You’ve added complexity wearing a productivity costume.

Adding a new event may seem exciting. But if your team is already drowning, another event isn’t a life raft. It’s another wave.

Every “yes” to a new thing must come with a “no” to an existing thing. Otherwise you’re just piling more weight onto a team that’s already carrying too much.

Trust me. I'm the king of "hey, I gotta fun idea we should do" here in my office. And then causing momentum everywhere else to slow and me wondering "why?"

FUN IDEA ALERT: Hold a Stop-Doing Meeting

This might be the most productive meeting you will ever have. And I promise that most nonprofits have never, nor will ever, hold one.

Get your staff and key board members in a room. Ask five questions:

1.    Which activity creates the least value for the effort required?

2.    What would happen if we paused it for one year?

3.    Which donor-facing work could replace that time?

4.    Are we continuing anything primarily to avoid an uncomfortable conversation?

5.    What are the three fundraising activities we will execute exceptionally well?

That last one is the killer. Not ten. Not seven. Three. Which three activities will define your fundraising for the next year?

And? You can finish the meeting with actual decisions. Not vague intentions. Decisions.

Not: “We should explore making the gala more efficient.”

Try: “We will not hold the gala next year. We will replace it with six small donor gatherings and 50 personal visits.”

Not: “We should probably rethink the golf tournament.”

Try: “The golf tournament is paused for 2027. That committee’s time will be redirected to thank-you calls and prospect meetings.”

Specific. Decisive. Final. That’s a stop-doing meeting. And it might be the most liberating hour your team has had in years.

Now, there is a bit of freedom you get on the other side of this.

AND I know this is scary.

Killing an event, pausing a program, stopping a tradition feels like failure or giving up or admitting something didn’t work.

It’s none of those things.

It’s simply a strategy.

It’s choosing to do fewer things better instead of more things badly.

It’s deciding that your team’s time and energy are too valuable to waste on zombies.

It’s trusting that the basics - the phone calls, the thank-you notes, the personal meetings, the consistent follow-up - will outperform the chaos every single time.

I can tell you honestly though, that that the organizations I work with that are thriving right now aren’t the ones doing the most. They’re the ones doing the right things.

Consistently. Relentlessly. With an almost BORING focus.

That’s not doing less. That’s doing better.

SO, your turn!

Tell me:

What’s the one fundraising zombie at your organization that everyone knows should die but nobody will kill? And what would you replace it with?

Name the zombie. Tell me what’s keeping it alive besides rage and stubbornness. And tell me what you’d do with the time if it was finally gone.

Send me your answer: patrick@dogoodbetterconsulting.com

And if you want help running the Return-on-Effort test, identifying your zombies, and building a stop-doing list that actually sticks – that’s exactly what we do inside Do Good YOUniversity. Templates, frameworks, weekly AMAs, and a community of fundraisers who are all learning to do less and raise more. www.DoGoodYOUniversity.com

Together, we’ve freaking got this.

-Patrick

P.S. I can already hear someone reading this and thinking “but Patrick, we CAN’T stop doing the golf tournament, Bob on the board would lose his mind.” Here’s my question: is Bob going to lose his mind because the tournament is strategically vital to the organization, or because Bob likes golfing? Because those are two very different conversations. And you already know which one it is.